In the first Star Wars movie, Luke Skywalker and friends somehow blew up the Death Star. That’s a bit how we felt in 2010 when after years of fighting we got a new global financial transparency requirement into the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act. The provision requires oil, gas, and mining companies to disclose tax and other payments in every country of operation. As I’ve been writing about in the last two weeks, we now feel like we are in The Empire Strikes Back. The oil industry has threatened to sue the SEC if they don’t get a regulation they like and are using lobbyists and lawyers to try to roll-back our victory.

Last week Oxfam activists portrayed Chevron, Exxon, and the SEC in bed together outside SEC headquarters in Washington, which generated goodcoverage including the morning commute on NPR. This week, the “hear no evil, see no evil” monkeys will be outside the Chevron tower in Houston, telling the company and its employees the time for silence is over.

Congress is ramping up the pressure on the SEC to issue a strong final rule and to follow the law—five prominent Senators wrote on Jan. 31, and we are expecting more Congressional pressure this week.

The battle is also being fought on a number of fronts. Over in Europe, activists staged a stunt a government building in London and the ONE campaign has a big petition drive to make sure European regulators stand up to oil company lobbying there. Elsewhere, allies in resource-rich countries such as Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, Senegal, Cambodia, and Ecuador are writing to the SEC to make sure they know how important this information is to hold their own governments accountable for the spending of oil and mining wealth.

Oil companies have a lot on their plate and this lawsuit has the makings of a classic PR nightmare. (Imagine the headlines—“Oil companies sue to keep tax payments secret”.) Let’s win again and bring this saga to an end.